My Toybox of Enjoyable Things

As one ventures through my site I am sure, my interest and hobbies will make themselves self-evident. However, within this chapter, I hope you can understand or share some of my joy for the many things that add quality to my life.

Poetry

A place that I can always escape resides in the joy I find in poetry. My love for poetry grew from a lesson I learned in third grade. Poetry is an expression of oneself, and grammar and spelling can come later or not at all. Well this is not particularly true. However, when I was not pressed to comprise a beautiful structured sentence perfectly, I found the flow of thoughts and ideas of mine generated a dazzling picture painting a story upon the page. The rich language, and vivid imagery used to convey a message in which some novels took pages just to build the foundation to the argument amazed me.

The art of constructing words in a way to hold multiple meanings made me feel special, and I have been able to share several pieces with the world through publications that I have been selected to be a part of. My work can be found now in books, magazines, newspapers, and newsletters. I have won an award bringing me to Washington DC. My favorites are the poems which bring joy to many, educate, or reveals a secret dimension of me. I love creating pieces to thank or remember an individual and their impressions of life instilled upon others. Scattered throughout the site you can discover a few of my pieces. I hope they encourage you to reflect, make you think, leave you questioning in wonder, and grant insights to things known and unknown.

The Dance

A thread of words
Sprawled on a page
Chaos and confusion
Who is this other
Falling
Falling
On my page
What story
Obscured in the deep
Appeasing to my ear
A wish between the
Author
Reader
Embraced within
A weaving relationship
Dancing
Dancing across the page
A tango to the music.

Leadership and Service

I find many simple joys in life, the laugh of a child, reading, the sound of music, riding on the back of my dad's motorcycle, and photography. Children, however, go beyond my simple joys and envitably love to share their experiences with anyone and everyone. When they feel like they made a difference, it comes across their face as magic. They prove to the world that although small, with bed times, and rules defined by adults, helping another is a power beyond what money can buy. It is within this childhood magic that I find myself waiting to assist someone else in the community. The joy I experience through acts of service are similar to that of an athlete playing a sport. I like to think that I helped make someone’s day just a little bit better. The peace and comfort I see in others I help, gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment, like I am truly contributing to a bigger picture of life and the earth we live on.

Rocks

Since I was young I had a fascination for the individualities and vast types of rocks in our world. I enjoyed learning about their properties, regions one could find them, and the history they had to offer. Each individual stone had a journey it had taken to get within my hands. My father for Christmas one year gifted for me a rock tumbler. I remember placing the provided rocks into this plastic noisy tumbler that ran for six months straight. (My dad told me I had to keep the in tin the basement… I cannot imagine why!) I saw the process of a rock get smaller and smaller as the sand I placed in the little red tumbler with water got finer. My polished rocks that started out at one point a decent size became tiny, and I learned about different hardness of rock types first hand, when I held the polished stone of a considerably larger size than that of another, equal in size six months before the process. Today, nestled in my top dresserdwar I have a colection of 1,987 rocks,which I continue to add to when visiting places of interest.

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.  
~ Albert Einstein

Space

Like rocks I also enjoyed gazing into the stars and learning about our solar system. I loved the idea of something greater just beyond our scope of knowledge, and that evident by a young girl’s discovery of Pluto, that anything is possible.

Gazing up into a black canvas glitering in light on a cool summer night, I find myself captivated by constlations and slipping into the abys and freedom of my imagination.

So as not to intrude too much on the layout I've kept the image small but feel free to play about with the code.

I'm always keen to find ways of keeping code to the bare minimum whilst not compromising on functionality, so if anyone can pass on tips for improving my coding technique, I'm open to suggestions!